Posts by Joe Montana

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Business lines

Basically if you can afford the rent to setup your business in such an area, you should be probably be paying for a business class internet service too and that means dedicated fibre leased lines, not home user oriented FTTC.

There will be very few residential properties in such areas, hence why it's not viable to connect up home user services.

If you want to cheap out on internet access, get a cheaper office too... Infact, if your business is tech oriented you will probably be better off getting a very cheap office and spending the savings on good connectivity.

Re: Dodgy Microsoft Code

524 days uptime is nothing, 4 figures is not uncommon for non windows boxes (unix, vms, netware, routers etc) and its quite telling that you used a linux box to protect the windows box from attack... your linux box probably had the same or higher uptime than the windows box behind it.

Re: IPv6

The ADSL service isn't free, and neither is the POTS service. Separate out the costs of physical line, POTS and ADSL and let users choose which of them they want. I have POTS service with ADSL but i never use it, never have anything connected to it and don't even know what the number is.

Re: IPv6

Pretty easy actually, ipv6 will allocate a /64 block (or larger) to each customer, so any address within that range is assumed to be that customer...

Tracking home user NAT with v4 works the same way, one ip - many physical users behind it but all assumed to be the same customer.

Higher level NAT on the other hand is harder, you could have hundreds if not thousands of users behind the same ip, which becomes extremely problematic. The ISP now needs to log every single connection in order to track a user back, and third parties have to log both the source and destination ports in an attempt to correlate with the ISPs logs, and all of this requires that the ISP actually does logging and actually co-operates with you. If you've just running a small time service and you want to block abusive users, your pretty screwed and you have no choice but to block the entire isp.

Re: Oh FFS!

Just require the ISPs to provide a dual stack by default service (which is already the case in most of the US), and for any isp supplied hardware to have it supported and enabled by default.

Wether users choose to make use of the ipv6 portion is up to them, if they are typical home users connecting their recent versions of windows/osx/ilnux/whatever to the isp suplied router then v6 will just work by default.

Support for other devices is down to the vendors of those devices, assuming those devices even need to communicate with the outside world (no reason you cant still use ipv4 on a lan long after the rest of the internet has moved on).

Re: Someone is going to prison for a VERY long time

Depends what you mean by gross neglect...

Many places do follow best practices, and yet are still highly vulnerable. Quite often the technology they are using is fundamentally flawed, and securing it is either not possible or horribly impractical.

Most companies have horrendously insecure internal networks, which are hidden from the outside world behind firewalls... But once you get a foothold inside, and there are many ways to do that (eg lure them to a website to exploit their browser, the firewall may block inbound connections but it will usually allow some form of outbound) the whole network is wide open for attack.

People frequently seem to lose their common sense when it comes to computers, and lose the ability to solve problems that they would solve easily if there was not a computer involved...

This is generally down to fear of technology, a fear that is perpetrated by systems that are excessively complex and more importantly, filled with warnings which scare users...

People who started out on systems which encouraged experimentation and were hard to break like the C64 or Spectrum are generally not afraid of technology and can use common sense to troubleshoot, those who start with windows which is filled with "dont look here, these are system files and you can break everything" warnings generally become paranoid of breaking something.

So what we need, is systems for end users which aren't horribly fragile and full of scary warnings.

Apps?

A windows version for arm will be just like windows for alpha, ppc, mips and ia64... Absolutely useless because there will be little or no native software for it.

Most applications for windows are closed source and will be compiled for x86, so you won't get them running on arm.

You would probably be able to get open source server software running on windows/arm without too much difficulty, but virtually all such software also runs on linux and has already been built for linux/arm.

Linux/arm is also tried and tested, whereas windows/arm is new, and you also have no guarantee it wont suffer the same fate as the other non x86 versions of windows and get abandoned in short order.

Re: Microsoft embracing Linux?

But what are the percentages for amazon and google? I would imagine most people intending to deploy linux based servers would specifically avoid azure, so it should have a much lower percentage than other providers.

Re: Is it so confusing?

The windows brand and the false idea of a "unified platform" was poisonous for the old windows mobile (and windows ce)... I knew many people who bought them under the false belief they would be able to run the same programs as their windows desktop as thats what much of the advertising implied. Needless to say they were severely disappointed.

Re: Eh?

Aside from that, many hosting providers charge per port so having lights out on a separate nic would increase hosting costs.

Most IPMI controllers let you tag the traffic to put it on another VLAN, but again that depends on the hosting provider to configure their switches accordingly and in that case the host itself can still access the VLAN in question so if you compromise one box you can start attacking all the other IPMI devices (which are likely to be even more badly configured on the assumption they cant be directly reached from the internet).

Also if you have a box hosted far away from your physical location, having lights out is absolutely essential incase anything goes wrong... Most hosting providers offer a remote hands service but they are expensive and often not very capable.

Re: Don't forget the design

The problem is that a complex permissions system means that many people don't know how to use it, and most of those that do can't be bothered to do so.

For most use cases the standard unix permissions are not only more than adequate, they are also easy to understand and easy to manage. There's a reason that very few people enable the more advanced ACLs.

Re: Don't forget the design

Even if you remove the "gui", your just removing the frontend management programs, the actual graphics stack is all still there and used to display a command prompt in a movable resizable window. Your not truly running without a gui, your just running with a crippled one. It would be like running X11 on linux with a basic window manager and then only using it to run xterm.

Re: Sorry: Not impressed with aircraft industry rants

Licence enforcement code

Another example of where licence enforcement code causes a denial of service to paying customers... All of this licence enforcement crap is basically companies distrusting and screwing their own customers, these functions provide no benefit whatsoever to the actual customers and they don't harm the pirates who will simply apply a crack to remove them.

The fact that companies will go to significant extra effort to implement functions purely for their own benefit and to the detriment of their paying customers is ridiculous. If only they spent that time fixing bugs instead.

Toughen up?

It's the so called "victims" that need to toughen up...

What ever happened to "sticks and stones may break my bones but words can never hurt me". We were always taught to ignore verbal/written taunting in school as it was harmless, and the same with anything said online - someone insults you, insult them back or ignore them. It's not worth expending any effort, if the most someone can do is write something offensive about you from behind a computer screen then they really are utterly harmless.

Makes sense..

For most people, the "windows" branding is toxic, it brings up associations with an unfashionable, boring and unreliable product that is only really tolerated because most people are unaware that anything else exists in its core market.

Re: How about ....

This is mostly what's happening, gradually...

Most new applications are browser (or at least java) based these days, and will usually run on linux even if they don't officially support doing so.

Once you have cross platform apps, the client lock-in is gone and you can choose the client devices which provide the best value on a level playing field - there is very little if any reason to choose windows in this situation.

Lockouts?

Account lockouts are a bad thing, if you implement them then you open yourself up to malicious parties who will intentionally try to get all your users locked out - causing an absolute nightmare for support.

And account lockouts will be ineffective at stopping account compromises... As pointed out, lots of users have very common passwords like "password", so rather than try thousands of passwords against 1 account a hacker is going to try "password" against thousands of accounts and in doing so won't trigger any account lockouts because he only makes 1 attempt per account.

Access to data

"no Google staff would be able to access the data"

WTF? of course they would! how naive are people?

Just because no member of google staff would have an account on the frontend application that's typically used to access the data, doesn't mean they don't have administrative access to the underlying server on which the data is stored or even physical access to the servers/drives its stored on.

It is obvious that any number of google staff could gain access to the data if they wanted to, and to claim otherwise is ridiculous.

Re: Eh?

Any gains he made might have occurred in the most recent tax year for which he hasn't filed yet... And even if he does, he would also be able to offset the losses against anything he made, so he might even be down overall and thus not liable to pay any tax.

Re: Interest

Kids will learn better when they are motivated, and are learning about something they are genuinely interested in...

That said, learning the basics of coding is really just an extension of maths and language.. And while the majority of people will never use these skills once they leave school, the same is true of many other subjects.

On the other hand IT related teaching is badly in need of reform... Teaching kids how to use specific versions of mundane applications is extremely counter productive. By the time they leave school the software they have learnt will no longer be in use having been replaced by newer versions or even by something else entirely (when i was in school we were taught wordperfect for dos).

What's needed is to teach general concepts in a multitude of different applications, so that people can easily adapt to different applications.

Vulnerable behind the firewall

Most organisations are like this, they use the firewall as their one and only line of defence against external attack, and do absolutely nothing about internal threats. Once you're behind the firewall at 99% of organisations you can rip through the network trivially.

Re: Excellent!

And this is EXACTLY why these documents should be preserved in fully documented file formats. Storing them in proprietary formats is extremely dangerous, as you have no control and no way to properly diagnose any corruption that might (And does) occur.

Non editable

The idea of using PDF isn't for making content impossible to edit, in fact that's an impossible and therefore pointless goal, as there will always be ways to edit data.

The purpose of PDF is for data that isn't intended to be edited, and thus the format doesn't include metadata that is unnecessary for simply viewing and is only useful if you want to edit. A similar analogy would be providing the document on paper, or providing a program in precompiled form.

Full OS?

You have it backwards, only geeks need a full OS...

For the average user, a minimal system controlled by someone else (ie someone actually technically literate to manage a computer) is what they need. End users don't want the complexity or risks involved with a full blown OS, they just want to get stuff done. This is also why ipads and games consoles are popular.

What we do need however, are alternatives to chromebooks which aren't controlled by google (but are still controlled by someone, since most end users are not capable of managing their own internet connected computers).

Re: Laughie Charlie Translation from MS speak

There isn't much availability of ARM in the server market, believe me i've been looking...

I can buy a proper 1U x86 box with a quad core cpu and lights out management for a few hundred, for ARM i have a choice between phones, dev boards and expensive boxes with lots of cpus from the likes of calxeda. Where are the sub £1000 1u ARM rackmount servers?

Re: @DainB

IA64 had pretty good Linux support, and if your workload was entirely based on open source software then there was no technical reason you couldn't run it on IA64... If you depended on any closed source software then IA64 was typically not an option, as most closed source vendors would typically not port their stuff to IA64.

The problem boiled down to price, all of the IA64 hardware that was available cost more and consumed more power than comparably performing x86 and x86-64. I would have seriously considered IA64 for my workloads had it been price competitive with x86.

For ARM this doesn't need to be a problem, if they can make servers which are competitively priced then they should sell just fine.

Re: IT security? Ha!

Regularly changing the password can often be detrimental...

Chances are the root password for suse and mysql cannot be directly used externally, SSH is likely configured to disallow root logons and mysql is often configured not to allow remote connections, making the root password only useful if you have physical access to the console or access to an unprivileged account that is able to run 'su'...

Similarly if using modern hashing its unlikely a 12 character password will be cracked unless its dictionary based, and thats assuming you can get a copy of the hashes.. If you can get the hashes you usually already have root, but people reuse passwords across multiple systems and hashes can sometimes be lifted from backups or installation images.

If your password is complex and rarely changed, people who need it can remember it...

If your password has to be changed regularly, then people are unlikely to keep remembering new random passwords, instead they will cheat - either using simplistic passwords (dictionary words, formulaic and predictable passwords etc), or write their passwords down. Most companies require users to change their passwords monthly, and huge numbers of those users use a dictionary word as their password with a number on the end that either relates to the month/year in which the password was set, or simply increments with each change.

Personally i never change the root passwords on my servers either. To use them you need physical access, all remote access is via SSH with keys.

Re: Google doesn't spy, it gets to know people

Only they don't plant tracking devices into their pockets, they make tracking devices available which people then choose to put in their pockets.

For every google product available, there is one or more viable alternatives. I don't like their information gathering business model either, but i know that i can avoid their products and suffer no ill effects.

What's more i can even use some of their products while explicitly avoiding the information gathering aspects, e.g. third party builds of android and chromium to name but a few.

Same problem

I too use unique email addresses, and often meet with disbelief when i attempt to contact those who have leaked my address to spammers...

What we need is a common forum where we can report sites that do this, perhaps they would be forced to listen if a large number of people complained about the same thing and named&shamed them in a public forum.

Higher spec

A console doesn't need to be as high spec as a general purpose system, although the idea of steambox gives up some of the traditional console advantages in favour of flexibility...

On a system which is designed solely for gaming, you won't be running all kinds of other cruft in the background so at the very least you need less memory, less cpu and less disk space. It's also likely that SteamOS, although linux based will be significantly stripped down to remove things which are not necessary for gaming - similar to what MS have done with the xbox.

Ofcourse on a traditional console the hardware is static, so you can do away with the overhead of an OS and driver layers entirely. Many Amiga games did this because performance was significantly better, and AmigaOS is considered extremely lightweight and efficient compared to modern systems.

Re: lost the plot

IA64 was killed by closed source software... If you were running all open source code they actually ran quite well, i had a couple of them running linux and all the typical stuff compiled and ran on them just fine.

If Intel were to introduce a new architecture aimed at Android, ChromeOS or Linux it would have a much better chance of succeeding as not only could Intel port these systems themselves instead of relying on someone else, but most of the existing applications would run with little more than a recompile anyway.

Arguably Intel should come out with a new architecture, the legacy baggage of x86 is a millstone around their neck such that even being a step ahead on fabrication tech they are still having trouble competing with arm. If they were to come up with a new architecture designed specifically for power efficient applications they could easily get themselves ahead of arm.

x86 is only beneficial for users who are stuck with a lot of legacy closed-source code...

Linux and other open source is architecture agnostic, we used to run linux on alpha when it was the fastest available, and we run linux on arm or mips now for low power systems.

It was closed source code above all else that killed itanium... Linux runs quite well on it, but windows as a joke - the core os would run but you had virtually no apps and 99% of windows apps dont come with source so you cant recompile them yourself.

Re: ooooouch

When it comes to content creation, Apple are a big player... Wintel is mostly relegated to boring business desktops and gamers.

A big shake up will happen sooner or later, the idea of an extremely complicated system like windows being used by average users is ridiculous... Why should users be expected to manage updates for a myriad of different applications, maintain antivirus and firewall rules etc. Non technical users are better off with walled garden devices like ipads or chromeos devices.

Even business desktops will eventually ditch windows, once there are a large enough set of users running non-ms tools then interoperability becomes essential, at which point the only real advantage ms ever had is gone... If they're no longer locked in, very few businesses will choose expensive, insecure, unreliable windows, and will go for something else install - probably linux.